Not letting the media decide

I stayed up late last night looking at numerous news web sites to see what they said on the debate. I read and read and read. By 2am PST, more than six hours after the debate finished there was no mainstream media news site saying anything decisive about who won the debate or not. Now call me cynical, but could this be because "the wrong man" won?

I noticed that by midnight all the online polls at NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN showed that voters thought Kerry won by a wide margin. Yes I know that on-line polls are not scientific, far from it in fact, but I do believe that Republicans are likely to be rushing to vote online as much, if not more so than the non-Republicans.

However I don't even need a poll to tell me who won the debate, it was obvious. As an Anyone But Bush Again supporter I was ready for Kerry to suck. The liberal media and liberal pundits had all briefed us to expect a cocky holier-than-thou Bush to soundbite, mislead, mispeak, grin, smirk and gurn (you'll have to look that up) his way to victory. Furthermore we expected Kerry to sputter, waffle, blunder and generally slither to defeat. We were ready to concede the ABBA candidate was just the lesser of two evils, that he was a compromise and they we'd hold our noses on November 2nd and vote for him just because there was no one else with a chance of defeating Bush.

So when neither of these happened and in fact Kerry managed to put Bush on the defensive we were pleasantly surprised. It was Bush who ended up sputtering, crawling, and generally sounding like a broken, broken, broken record. You can't win a Presidential debate by repeating "being President is hard" twenty two times, and that's because he didn't win. Furthermore after the event all the Bush team could come up with as positive spin was "Bush clearly won because he showed he has a heart". Excuse me? We're not electing a bleedin empath here. We want someone who'll do the right thing in the first place and not have us feeling so bad we want to hit the analyst's couch for some heart warming apple pie platitudes to make everything better. That seems to be Bush's solution for Iraq - "Don't tell the troops its a SNAFU quagmire, how will that make them feel?"

What I did read later on in the night, and hear on the news was the mainstream media saying words to the effect of "its not clear who won, that will be decided in the week to come as the media decides". Excuse me, when the media decides? Who gives a f**k what the media thinks, the media isn't voting. How about just polling the twenty million or so people who watched the debate and let them decide?

Well decide they did - the Gallup poll gives it 53 to 37% to Kerry which is a stunning result considering how evenly split the voters are supposed to be. 19% of Bush voters declared Kerry the winner and 11% declared a draw. Only 3% of Kerry voters gave it to Bush, and 4% were undecided. The ABC News poll gave it 45 to 36% to Kerry.

So why is it when I survey the headlines of mainstream news sites I don't see any of them leading with public opinion that Bush lost the debate? All I see is "Bush, Kerry spar in first debate" (ABC News), "Bush, Kerry clash over history, allies" (NBC), "War Center Stage At Debate" (CBS), "Post Debate, Candidates Hit Trail Again" (FoxNews), and "Debating the first debate" (CNN).

But interestingly it does look as though even the hardened Republican boosters, Fox News are now starting to report US and even world opinion that Kerry won, albeit in an AP story linked too from their debate page. Other stories are popping up on the rest of the mainstream media as the post debate zeitgeist becomes undeniable, Kerry won. But still, they aren't shouting about it. Like it or not, isn't the first debate the single most important event of this election since Kerry was selected? Isn't Kerry's surprise performance and convincing win in public opinion worth some serious column inches?

Oy. Two words: media bias.

Now don't get me wrong, this is actually how I think such an event should be reported. But ultimately its the knowledge that their reaction if it had gone the other way would have been very different. Think about it, what if the ABBA voters worst fears were realized, wouldn't the mainstream media be leading with "Bush crushes Kerry" all day, all week and all the way to November 2nd? Wouldn't we be getting endless talking heads giving a blow by blow account of each Bush comment and how he wiped the floor with that Frenchie loving Kerry? Instead when Kerry wins we get "Well, er, it appears as if voters think Kerry won, but it hasn't made any difference to the voting preferences so who cares, lets move swiftly along to a story about a cat stuck up a tree in BFE..."

Lets hope that Edwards and Kerry can continue their romp to a 4-nil victory in the debates so we won't have to sample any irrational exuberance over a Bush debating victory.